As service providers continue to deploy and upgrade network infrastructures in support of voice-over-Internet-Protocol (VoIP) traffic, network infrastructures are rapidly becoming more complex. In addition to the potentially large number of deployed network components, the network infrastructures are complex in that IP network components are increasingly being deployed not only in support of IP-to-IP communications, but for interfacing to other networks (such as Publicly Switched Telephone Networks) as well. This situation is exacerbated by use of network components provided by numerous equipment vendors, especially since such network components are still relatively undeveloped with respect to reliability and scale.
In order to analyze proposed network architectures (and associated network components), service providers often design and deploy test networks in order to validate the performance of the proposed network architectures. Unfortunately, due to resource constraints, such test networks are often implemented in a controlled laboratory environment as small-scale versions of the proposed network architecture. The service providers then attempt to extrapolate the network analysis results in order to predict the performance of the full-scale network that the service provider intends to deploy. As such, comprehensive, accurate analysis of the network to be deployed it typically quite difficult.
Furthermore, since modification of an existing test network requires significant effort, design and deployment of test networks substantially limits the ability of service providers to analyze numerous network architectures. Thus, due to the numerous drawbacks and limitations of existing network analysis techniques, accurate knowledge with respect to performance of a particular network is often unattainable until a service provider deploys and operates the proposed network in a live environment. As a result, service providers assume a substantial risk of uncovering customer-impacting network problems in a live network supporting customer traffic.
As such, a need exists in the art for a method and apparatus for analyzing network performance of a representative network architecture prior to deployment of the network architecture for supporting customer traffic.